The Hired Guns are seeking a Senior Product Manager for a fast-growing consumer tech startup that has found its addressable market and is scaling up rapidly.
Nitty Gritty
Your future coworkers rave about what it’s like to work for this company (and CEO) on Glassdoor, and Crain’s “Best Places to Work” agrees. This place treats its employees like it treats its customers … extremely well.
They have identified an underserved audience and have built an entire product suite around it. Right now they are the only game in town, so they need to move fast and continue to dominate as they hoover up all available market share. The sales window is short — only about 1 month — which makes it tricky, and that’s exactly why we need a truly clever Senior Product Manager who enjoys “Rubiksing” key features and functionality. Your new boss, the VP of Product, will help chart your map while also giving you plenty of career growth moments so you can shine.
What Success Looks Like
You’ll map the product’s course for at least one and maybe two mission-critical initiatives right out of the gate. This means high stakes and along with it, high visibility. In your first 90 days, you’ll make everyone comfortable that they picked you as the right lead to move them forward. And throughout the rest of your first year, you’ll bedazzle them with your ability to examine whitespace and build sexy products that users are not only grateful for but also that they’ll spend big bucks on.
Hired Gun Profile
As you know, product managers develop over time, often from other disciplines. And for this client, a design thinker with a strong UX orientation is far and away the preference. Your previous product management gigs include big-name e-tailers like Lemonade and, of course, Amazon. Location-based services like Lyft, Foursquare, and AirBnB are also welcome, provided you’re comfortable working on desktop products and not just mobile apps. You’ve got to arrive with direct experience as a product manager who knows the ins and outs of moving customers down the conversion funnel.
The entire company has a growth mindset, so your resume should tell not only how you’ve launched products but also how you’ve iterated them over time — the tricky bits and all. You’re already comfortable working in Agile and driving sprints at a fairly intense cadence.
Along with this, they want to see that you’ve moved up within your company at least one rung. You’re already a senior product manager ready to move to a lead, or you’re a newly-minted lead who wants a new challenge. You’re still very much at the see-it-do-it level. And that’s important because you’ll be entering this company without direct reports (yet … remember, they’re growing). So far, you’ve spent your career getting consumer-facing, mobile-centric experiences out the door on deadline and up to spec at household name apps and websites.
Trello, Mixpanel, Clubhouse, Sketch, InVision, Webflow, Zeplin, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all in your daily workflow. And while initially you’ll be working on the desktop experiences, you can be assured that your Android and iOS experience will come in handy as they envision their native apps.
You love testing, and you do the happy dance when asked to go beyond A/B into multivariate testing combined with more subjective interview and survey findings. (Seriously, consumer experience is so much.) And yet, you trust your gut when the data only tell the what, not the why.
Inside Skinny
Where many product roles would have you drill down into specific expertise, this one requires a generalist who will keep learning all of them, maintaining a bird’s-eye view of the entire landscape. And this will set you up nicely for a product leadership role down the line in your career.
Net-Net
This role has the makings to be the most enjoyable and interesting product management gig of your life. With close-knit colleagues who really believe in the work they’re doing (and plenty of dogs to pet at the in-office bar), you may have just found that unicorn role you’ve been looking for to keep doing huge projects without the headaches of a huge company.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, creed, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital status, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law.
